


Impure

by uumuu



Series: Butterfly Nest [2]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Metamorphosis, Ost-in-Edhil, Second Age
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-31
Updated: 2015-10-31
Packaged: 2018-04-27 21:43:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5065393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uumuu/pseuds/uumuu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Something unexplainable happens to Celebrimbor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Impure

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sassynails](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sassynails/gifts).



> Many thanks to amyfortuna for beta reading!

Light flickered above him.

Rapid, intermittent flashes of darkness.

Celebrimbor's head snapped up, startled from the reverie into which he had fallen while going over some of his newest notes – calculations and observations he had collected for his most ambitious project to date. The sheets were still clutched feverishly in his right hand. He cast an enquiring glance out of the window. It was dark, haloes of torch-light glowing through the thick fog which had fallen to shroud Ost-in-Edhil. He strained his ears. Not a sound in the Gwaith-i-Mírdain.

He turned his head up again, and studied the lamp, fixed to the ceiling above the desk by a slim chain. It had surely been his imagination. Fëanorian lamps never faltered, they couldn't. The light within them burned steady, inextinguishable. He knew well. He knew the mechanism by which they worked: it was the first crafting process of any significance he had learnt from his grandfather. There were only a few of them left, and he had collected most. Sometimes he thought of making new ones, but the impulse was always a fleeting one: it felt wrong to even seriously entertain the idea.

He shook his head to banish the memories, stretched his legs under the table and yawned, then returned his attention to the sheets. If only he could have found a way to fashion those rings –

The light flickered again. 

This time he wasn't half-asleep. He perceived it clearly. He looked up and around. The room was still. But even if there had been wind, and the outer shell of the lamp had somehow broken, the crystal within wouldn't have been affected. He frowned. If a crack had somehow opened up in the crystal, could it –

He started violently at the touch of something warm and smooth on his hand. 

He quickly lowered his gaze. There was a moth. A moth had landed on the back of his hand. A large thing, dark slate grey with red streaks and circles on its paper-thin wings.

He heaved a sigh of relief. 

It had almost felt like the touch of a hand: gentle, caring, soothing in a way. He delicately lifted his hand. The moth didn't budge, and he had the distinct impression that it was looking at him. It crawled slowly up to his wrist, gliding ticklishly on its tiny feet, but when it stopped there his skin began to sting – a sizzling pricking, as if had just scorched himself. 

He hastily chased the moth away with his left hand, and it vanished.

*

That night, after he dragged himself to bed, still nursing his aching wrist and shaken by what had to be a product of his own imagination, he dreamt of his father. 

He dreamt his face – the serene, loving countenance he had known as a child, smiling down at him whenever he lifted his arms up towards his father, clamouring for his attention, next to the death-face he had never seen. He didn't know exactly how his father had died. He didn't remember any longer if it was because he had never asked, or because he didn't want to hear when people told the tale. Either way, it was one of the many things he couldn't ignore the more effort he put into trying to escape them. He kept thinking about it with morbid curiosity, and then the disfigured face his mind conjured often morphed into his own.

*

His skin started to change colour. 

The markings were faint at first, light brownish patches that could have been mistaken for bruises, but weren't. They didn't hurt, and they grew steadily darker and larger.

He scrubbed his skin furiously in the baths, until it was reddened, but those stains didn't go away. He often cried himself to sleep. He was jittery when he was in people's company, because he was afraid, irrationally, that his clothing would disappear and they would see the marks on his skin. They would see what sort of monster he was turning into.

Annatar remarked on his uneasiness, and tried to persuade him to talk of whatever was troubling him, but he couldn't tell him. He couldn't risk revealing everything to him, and lose his friendship and his support. He didn't want to lose the life he had built for himself, fighting ghosts, resentment and more subtle hostility. 

And yet he felt it slip away. The appearance of the marks was undoubtedly tied to the moth's appearance. The stains had branched out from his right wrist, where the moth had crawled. And surely the type of transformation had to do with _him_. He convinced himself that it was his family's curse. He wondered if his father's body, too, had been tainted like that before the end. He was his flesh and blood, they were indissolubly united. There was no reason why he should be spared.

The moth returned from time to time, and sat on the lamp, which flickered. There was no use trying to chase it away or trying to kill it. It would disappear for a while, then return.

His destiny was black.

*

The markings on his body became more definite, creating an elaborate pattern. They spread from his arms to his chest and legs, slowly but inexorably. Finally, on a quiet cloudless night, they crept up his neck, and covered his face and his hands too.

He watched in horror his eyes become large pools of black. He stood motionless for a few agonising heartbeats in front of the mirror, holding his breath, hoping against the evidence of the reflection that his eyes would go back to what they had been before, the speckled grey he had inherited from his father. They didn't. He lifted his left arm and smashed the mirror with his fist, letting out a strangled scream through clenched teeth. In the broken shards on the floor he could still see his face – and his father's face and father's father's face – with its thick black lines and the red circles which reminded of the moth's colouring. 

He fell to his knees in the middle of the wreckage and passed out, glass-splinters digging into his flesh.

In the morning, he woke to find himself having been laid down on his bed.

He looked up, dizzy from pain and distress, and there was Annatar's gentle face a few inches from his. Annatar didn't ask him anything at first, and set about cleaning his hands, arms and side carefully of any glass splinters.

“What happened here?” he asked then, in his ever so assuasive voice. “What has you so troubled?”

Celebrimbor inhaled shallowly several times before he felt calm enough to speak, but even then his voice came out thin and wobbly. “...about my work. It's -...I am unable to accomplish what I want to.”

“What is so daunting to you?” 

Celebrimbor's jaw clenched. He didn't want to tell Annatar about the rings. It was his own project, the one which would prove his worth.

He glanced in the broken mirror. His face was the same as usual, and he had to stifle a gasp of surprise and relief. Of course it was. Annatar wouldn't be talking to him if it hadn't. Perhaps, it _had_ all been a product of his imagination.

Annatar sighed, interrupting the confused stream of his thoughts. “Whatever it is, I am sure you will be able to overcome the difficulty you are facing,” he said. “All will be well.” 

*

All was terribly wrong. 

Annatar had revealed himself as Sauron. He had attacked Ost-in-Edhil. Celebrimbor was trying to stop him, but it was a hopeless fight. 

He couldn't win. 

He had been caught on a spiderweb from the start.

But when the end was close at hand, as Ost-in-Edhil burned and Sauron loomed over him, it was as if his spirit departed from his body, weightlessly borne aloft on a gentle current. He wasn't properly flying; it felt more as if he were floating, carried by a gentle current while his body, the Gwaith-i-Mírdain and the whole town became gradually smaller. He watched his body fall under Sauron's blows, then everything went dark around him, and there was a snug heat. 

After a while, the heat disappeared, but still around him was only darkness.

He wasn't sure how long he hovered in confusion, but at length he became aware of someone standing right opposite him, and with some difficulty he made out a face with butterfly eyes. For a moment he thought he was still looking into the mirror in his bedroom, and what had happened afterwards had been merely a dream. But the face, though similar to his own, had sharper features, and seemed singularly large, too.

“Uncle?” he tentatively whispered. “What –”

“You are safe,” Maglor said, in his unmistakable, bewitchingly melodious voice.

The voice's familiarity, so unhoped-for, should have reassured him but his bewilderment was too great to be assuaged. Hearing Maglor's voice come from that marked face made him rather uncomfortable.

“Am I dead?”

“No, but your body will be soon. ...it is lamentable, that you should lose your body, Tyelperinquar.”

“What happened to you?” Celebrimbor asked with growing unease.

“My grandmother's gift. You will understand, in time, after you get used to your new form,” Maglor gently said. “For now, sleep. Your body will soon be dead, and if you stay awake, you will feel it.”

Celebrimbor wanted to protest, but an irresistible drowsiness washed over him, and the heat was back. A moment before he slipped into sleep, he realised. The heat was from being held in the hollow of Maglor's cupped hands, and in his uncle's big round black eyes he saw – _he_ was now a moth.

**Author's Note:**

> Celebrimbor's body getting covered in moth-marks as well as the detail of the flickering light were inspired by the [Butterfly Caught](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g45PgMJMqLY) music video by Massive Attack.
> 
> [Here](http://oddiant.poatemisepare.ro/most-beautiful-moths-in-the-world/) are some pictures of pretty moths.


End file.
